


if this is to end in fire then we should all burn

by Aethelar



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 22:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3913540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Let's talk about Ruby.</p><p>Let's talk about a demon who betrayed, who lied and corrupted and stole and stole and stole until the heart of Lucifer's vessel was hers to command. Let's talk about how she laughed when it was all done, how she took their triumph and showed them how far they had fallen. How far she had dragged them down.</p><p>Let's talk about Ruby the demon who remembered love, and used it like a weapon. Let's talk about the demon who remembered what loyalty meant, and followed it to her mistress' death. Let's talk about the demon who was a human once, and whose humanity was too fierce for the fires of hell to deny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if this is to end in fire then we should all burn

Let's talk about Ruby.

Let's talk about a demon who betrayed, who lied and corrupted and stole and stole and stole until the heart of Lucifer's vessel was hers to command. Let's talk about how she laughed when it was all done, how she took their triumph and showed them how far they had fallen. How far she had dragged them down.

Let's talk about how she didn't disappear. How she stayed in that dusty, grimy church where God's chosen heroes had broken the last seal and unleashed the devil on the world. How one of them held her arms behind her back and the other sank her knife into her breast until it hit her heart and kept on going, until it scraped her ribs and tore the flesh of her lungs -

Not that it mattered. The body was dead when she entered it; the heart and lungs and flesh and bone was just so much meat that she kept from rotting with a barely concious trickle of power. The sting of the knife was not its jagged blade; it was its power, the touch of death the kiss of fire and salvation and _freedom_.

They say that Ruby was a Lucifer-fanatic. The demons dreamed again when their master rose, dreamed like they hadn't dreamed in years and it was a glorious thing. Ruby wasn't there to see it.

Do you think he would have been proud of her?

Sam was young, so very young, and he broke like an eager puppy in her hands, rushing forwards with his new sharp edges and looking back to check that he was still allowed to have them. Sam broke once and again and every time she ran her fingers over his cheeks she could feel him splintering under her touch.

Would Lucifer have been satisfied with this broken vessel, would he have thanked her for the care she took in carving heartbreak into his soul?

She had been young once. She had been five and ran and laughed and told her sister to wait because she couldn't keep up. She had been twelve and solemn faced as she watched her mother's quick fingers and tried to commit their movements to memory. She had been fifteen and pretty and she danced through a thousand endless nights as the rain soaked through and the chill sent shivers of delight down her spine.

She told the Winchesters that she remembered what it was like to be human. She let them think that she helped them out of some remaining kindness, some grief or guilt or goodness still fighting in her blackened demon soul.

Let's talk about Ruby the demon who remembered love, and used it like a weapon. Let's talk about the demon who remembered what loyalty meant, and followed it to her mistress' death. Let's talk about the demon who was a human once, and whose humanity was too fierce for the fires of hell to deny.

It's not unusual. It's not even strange. Crowley knew who he was, knew what he sold his soul for and what family he left behind. Even the lowliest of recruits knows where their bones are buried and what name is carved on their tombstone. But these, these things are just facts – dry and dusty and as dead as the rotting bodies they belonged to. _Memories_ are so much more and they burned in Ruby like the weight of damnation on her soul.

Ruby was a girl who was human, who was loved. Ruby was a girl that the morning star had been cast down to hell for not loving enough. Ruby was a girl with salvation awaiting her, a girl who deserved nothing but could have everything if she just opened her heart to the empty skies and believed.

Ruby was a girl who sat by her brother's bedside and ground herbs to a thousand different pastes and lit incense burners of bark and wood and reeds and the expensive, exotic oil she'd stolen in the hope that it might work -

Let's tell the story of a girl who buried her brother and didn't cry, who balled her hands into fists until her dull nails left crescent moons in her palms, who bared her teeth at the world and said no.

Let's tell the story of a girl who lived with her sister, who hung up forbidden protective charms that the mad old woman on the outskirts of town had given her, who watched and waited and noticed the things that she had always been told to ignore.

Let's tell the story of a girl who lied, because Ruby had always found it easier than telling the truth. She lied with her pretty smiles and the way her hair spun behind her like golden sunlight when she danced. She lied with her eyes, warm and brown and sparking with good humour; she lied with the hesitant way she spoke long words and the blank incomprehension when people spoke long words back to her.

When the church men came, she lied with her hands and her voice and the demure curtsy she ended the conversation with, because it was heresy to believe in witchcraft and she was nothing if not good. When people went missing and her brother's shadow stretched long over a town he had died in months before, when the heavy set stranger with too many weapons and too few words started asking questions that her sister was too trusting not to answer, when she watched and listened and learnt everything she could and burned the lock of hair she kept tucked away somewhere safe and promised her brother that she was sending him to a better place -

The man left, squinting and suspicious and his dusty pack horse's load that little bit lighter for his troubles. In the guttering light of the cooking fire and the quiet moments when no one was looking, Ruby studied the knife she had taken from him and tried to decipher the looping script of the book that had been in his left saddlebag. She didn't recognise some of the words, couldn't read the ones she did, but the pictures told a story.

The mad old woman told several. She held out the book like a promise and cackled through more gaps than teeth and told Ruby she was a treasure, a delight, a girl with potential to be so much more than helpless. She rapped Ruby's knuckles with a wooden stick when she measured the herbs out wrong, undid her protective charms and sent them back with a simple, unyielding command: again. Do it again. Do it right. Do it a thousand times until you can do it in your sleep, then do it another thousand and make it better. Do it enough that you can do it when your skin is flayed from your body, when rusty hooks have torn out your eyes and your heart is a gaping hole in your chest and every last molecule of you burns as your lungs fill with smoke and betrayal and the acrid stench of hell –

Ruby was a pretty girl who danced and smiled and curtseyed demurely to the church men at her sister's door. She watched and she learned and she served frothing, luke-warm pints with a wide eyed guile that drew secrets from men's lips like apples falling from an overladen tree. Sometimes she took their stories, their anecdotes; sometimes she took their coins and their sharpened quills and their little daggers, concealed in their boots.

Ruby was a girl who smiled and lied and waited, waited, waited -

And when the local children went missing, when her sister's son never came home, when her sister stood up to the bow-legged man she called husband and said that she was going out to look and he could stay home and tend the fires for all she cared -

When they came, Ruby was ready. She danced in the moonlight and she sang long words that she didn't know the meaning of and her hands wove a pattern that they'd woven a thousand times before in the mad old woman's hut and she reached for the creature that held her sister's son and bared her teeth in challenge.

Let's talk about a demon who remembered what it was like to be human. To be desperate, to be afraid; to be powerless when her brother died and to fight with blood running down a stolen dagger to be sure that her sister wouldn't. Ruby was human, always and forever, and she burned with it – brighter and fiercer and always more because she could. Because who would stop her? She was a girl who the devil had scorned, and God had cast him down. She was a girl who was favoured above the mightiest of angels just because she was human, who was loved and who was saved if only she asked for salvation.

She was always so much better at taking than asking. It suited her lies.

Let's talk about a girl who slew the monster and saved the damsel, who returned her sister and her sister's son to the bow-legged man they called husband and father who'd sat by the fire with his head in his hands and mourned. Let's talk about a girl with her chin held high and her eyes lowered in a calculating state, a girl with nothing demure in the black blood stains on her clothes or the imprints of her crescent moon nails in her palm from clenching her fists too tight. Let's talk about a girl who told the truth and dared her sister to face it.

A girl who screamed at the stars because it was better than silence and better than hurting but not by much. A girl who slammed her fists against the wall but didn't cry, a girl who cursed in long words that she didn't have to understand to know what they meant.

A girl who had curtseyed demurely to the churchman and lied to his sweating, righteous face – a girl who spat in his eyes and bared her teeth until he lost his place in his faltering Latin chant and declared her too far gone to save.

She was the girl who held her brother's hand when he died, and held a lock of his burning hair when she killed him again. She was the girl who believed the mad old woman's stories and picked out the truth from the exaggerations of drunk men in the bar. She was the girl who was pretty and danced and smiled and shoved a knife through a monster's throat to save her sister and her sister's son.

Ruby learnt what it was like to be betrayed when she was a human, and she remembered it when she was a demon. She burned with smoke in her eyes and fire in her heart, and her sister didn't come to say good bye. She burned with screams in her ears and curses on her tongue and she burned with Sam's gentle hands on her breasts and Dean's wary gaze on her back and a thousand other demons fighting for a chance to be free of the fires of hell when the devil's trap was open -

She burned, and laughed, and bared her teeth at the mad old woman who patted her cheek fondly in hell and danced out to the world to find more young witches to lead astray.

They say that Lilith had her loyalty. They say that Lucifer had her love.

They were only half right, because it wasn't Lucifer that she loved, it was Sam. Sam who trusted her, who broke under her fingers and was remade into something sharp, Sam who kissed her and felt like rain in the night and made Ruby forget that she once had burned alive, was burning everyday even though she was nothing but smoke and deceit.

And Lilith, who she was loyal to, who she lied for and fought for and was tortured for. Who at the very end said no, who said I can't, who said I want to live. Who didn't have a choice, because she had Ruby's loyalty and she had the death sentence that came with it.

Ruby learnt how to love when she was human, when she burned her brother's soul because she loved him. Ruby learnt betrayal when she was human, when her sister handed her in to be burned at the stake and didn't come to say goodbye.

Ruby remembered being human, and Ruby stayed in the dusty, grimy church where her lover killed the one who held her loyalty, and Ruby bared her teeth in a bloody grin when he sank her knife into her chest and tore her heart her lungs her ribs her _soul -_

The knife burned, and it felt like freedom.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a tumblr! Come find me at [aethelar.tumblr.com](http://aethelar.tumblr.com)


End file.
